Fast Typing, Cities and Growth from MindJolt on This Week’s List of Fast Facebook Growers by Monthly Active Users

Devoted game designers may feel like giving up the profession when they see the top entry on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by monthly active users (MAU). How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, the entire aim of which is to type the ABCs quickly, may just be the simplest game since cow-tipping, with a similar lack of staying power after the few first moments of amusement.

That’s just our judgment, of course, and over a million people disagree, based on the proportion of five-star reviews the game is getting. And whatever its flaws, How Fast Are You?! does serve to illustrate one of the core precepts of design on Facebook: games can get away with a bare-bones interface as long as they pull off a single addictive feature well.

The addictive feature in this case is not typing the alphabet, it’s posting the time score to your wall — and all of your friends’ walls — to create a kindergarten-esque rivalry. Anyway, here’s the rest of the list:

Through the entire list, MAU growth is about half of what it was last week. FarmVille, which has led the rankings for several weeks, has finally dropped down to number two with only half a million new users.

But it’s also interesting to see that MindJolt, which had not gained many users for a few months before the deal, began growing again shortly before the acquisition. Now each week it adds a couple percentage points to its total fairly reliably. Chances are, a new growth strategy was put in place before the acquisition was announced — and whatever it is, it’s working.